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“Yeah, me too. Did our other guest settle in okay?”

“I believe so. She ate shortly after sunset and then retired.”

“Good.” She yawned. “I’m going to the east wing study. Can you bring me a decent bottle of wine from the cellar and something to eat?”

“Immediately, milady.”

“Are the lamps lit there?”

“No, milady. But I have a lantern here that—”

“Good enough.” She swiped up the lantern from its rack by the door, tinkered with it until the flame brightened. “Oh yeah, and get me some krinzanz while you’re at it, would you? There’s a bottle of tincture on top of the right-hand cabinet in the larder. The blue one.”

Kefanin scrutinized her face in the glow from the lantern. “Is that wise, milady?”

“No, it’s not. Your point is?”

A grave, deeply made bow, the sort she only got out of Kefanin when he disapproved mightily of a decision she’d made. She grunted, set off along the hall to the east wing, got there in a couple of minutes, a little out of breath. She worked the bolts. A faint, musty chill puffed out at her as she hauled the door open. It had been a while since anyone was in here.

Shadows capered on the walls while she moved about, lighting lamps from the wick of the lantern with a paper spill. A warm yellow glow spread over the untidy piles of books and less easily defined junk that owned the floor. The study emerged by increments from the gloom. Her desk in the center, stacked with papers and more books. The curtained window. Paintings of An-Monal on the walls, a map etched on Kiriath glass.

The Helmsman.

“Hello there, Archeth Indamaninarmal.”

“Hello Angfal.” She cleared off one side of the desk so she could put her feet up, pulled out the chair and sat down. “Been a while, hasn’t it?”

“You should not concern yourself on my part.” The Helmsman’s voice was deep and melodious, warmly avuncular and at the same time very slightly unnerving at the edges, as if at any moment it might suddenly scale upward into an inhuman scream. “You know time doesn’t have the significance for me that it does for . . . humans.”

Archeth grinned at the calculated insult. It wasn’t the first time. She cocked one ankle over the other on the corner of the desk and stared through the angle between her feet at the thing she shared the study with.

“Good to see you again, anyway.”

It took up most of the space near the wall, a span of nearly twenty feet and a height of at least ten. Mostly it looked like guts, riotous loops and coils of dark iron intestine all across the pale plasterwork and trailing down onto the floor, seemingly at random. But there were other parts, too, segments that hung fatly off the wall like lungs or tumors, and the whole thing was speckled with a series of weak green or yellowish lights behind what appeared to be thick glass optics each no larger than a thumbprint. Near the center and high up, two symmetrical sets of angled ribbing gripped the wall and ceiling, braced outward from a swollen oval the width of a man’s arms at full stretch. Not for the first time, Archeth thought that the arrangement was uncomfortably arachnoid—it gave the impression that some giant spider out of a child’s nightmare was somehow oozing through the wall prior to springing down on whoever happened to occupy the study at the time. Or, perhaps, that the same monstrous creature had simply been embedded there in the plaster like some grotesque hunting trophy.

It didn’t help that there were clusters of the little green and yellow lights gathered at the lower end of the oval like eyes.

She knew—because the Kiriath engineers who ripped Angfal out of a derelict fireship’s hull and installed it here had told her—that the Helmsman’s consciousness existed within the whole organic-looking mess at once, but that didn’t help much. Like it or not, she found herself habitually, instinctively, addressing herself to this hanging half-spider central structure, focusing on it whenever—

She was doing it now.

“So what do you want?” it asked her.

“Why should I want anything from you?” She unfixed her gaze from the clustered lights, made a point of gazing off toward the window instead. “Maybe I just stopped by for some light conversation.”

“Really?” Angfal’s voice didn’t change all that much, but Archeth thought there was now an accent of cruelty in the inquiring tone. “Come to reminisce, then, have we? Talk about all those good old times when your father and Grashgal were still alive, and the world was a finer, nobler place?”

She held down the hurt, the old familiar ache.

“Far as I know,” she said tonelessly, “Grashgal’s still alive. Far as you know as well, I’d have thought, given that when they cut you out of the wreckage, they left most of your sense organs behind in the hull.”

A tiny beat of silence.

“Archeth, daughter of Flaradnam, you come to me with elevated pulse, dilated pupils, swelling of blood in breasts and labia—though that’s ebbing now—and a fractionally unsteady vocal range, all clear symptoms of mingled sexual arousal and krinzanz abuse, a combination that is, incidentally, not ideally suited to your physiology, or indeed any physiology beyond the very youthful. And you’re staring out of a window that has a curtain drawn across it. So you see, as we both already know, my sense organs were not all left in the wreckage, and you did not come here for light conversation.”

The quiet seeped in again. She thought maybe one or two of the lights in Angfal’s coils had shifted color or maybe just brightened.

“I’m two hundred and seven years old,” she said. “That is youthful in Kiriath terms.”

“Yes, but not for a half-breed.”

Her temper snapped across, shiny steel rage at the break. “Hey, fuck you! Grashgal’s alive and laughing, somewhere better than this.”

“Grashgal is dead,” the Helmsman said patiently. “They all are. The Kiriath barely survived the voyage through the quick paths on their way here, and then their strength was at full flow, their science honed, and their minds undamaged. The forces they encountered undid all of that. They did not choose to come here, Archeth, despite anything the chronicles might claim to the contrary. They were shipwrecked here, and if they stayed four thousand years, it wasn’t because they liked the scenery. It was because they were afraid that the return would break them.”

Her rage failed her—she found herself looking at the bright jagged edge of it with weary disenchantment. This wasn’t the way to get what she wanted.

“Some say the passage opened their minds,” she offered. “Gave them the gift of a new vision, an insight across time. They say it didn’t corrupt, it enhanced.”

“Yes, that’s right,” Angfal jeered. “So much so that the most enhanced among them, those most gifted, as you put it, went off into the desert to contemplate their insight and apparently forgot to eat.”

“Not all of them.”

Most of them.”

“You’re talking about the extreme cases. As a race, we learned to cope.”

“We? We as a race?”

“Figure of speech. The Kiriath, as a race, adapted. And in the end their adaptation made them stronger, better able to resist the effects of a return voyage.”

“Oh, is that a thesis you’re developing? I’d be very interested to see your evidence.”

“I’m sorry they left you behind, Angfal.”

It broke the rapid parry-riposte pattern of the exchange better than if she’d screamed. A longer silence this time. The lack of motion in the Helmsman’s frozen iron coils and bulges seemed suddenly wrong, ridiculous, some impossible constriction of a natural emotional order and its responses. She looked for a shift in the lights, but they held their color, they burned steadily back at her.

The Helmsmen are not human, Archidi, her father had told her once, when she was still quite a small child. He spoke High Kir, and the word he used for “human” was one the Kiriath used about themselves. They aren’t like you or me or your mother at all, not even like the spirit of one of us in a bottle or a box. They are something . . . other. You must remember that in your dealings with them. They are not human, for all that they might sometimes do a good impression of one.